Information technology has evolved from a highly centralized and provider-driven model towards a more decentralized model, which promotes user empowerment, innovation, and personalization. The telecommunications industry makes use of a very hierarchical model of device networking, which governs positioning and roles for the entire system, roughly the analogue of centralized mainframe computing before the advent of the microcomputer. In such a system, end users operating at the bottom of this network hierarchy have little or no influence or control on how services they require are delivered to them, and much of the computational resources of idle end-users systems, such as CPU (central processor unit) cycles, network capacity, and memory storage, go unused.